Configuration Control of a Flexible Micro Robotic Arm for Catheter-type Microrobot

Abstract

The paper presents a control strategy for a hyper redundant micro robotic arm that has the particularity to have either a) discrete joints: only a small finite number of position are allowed within min and max bounds and b) continuous joints: the joint can move continuously within its min and max bounds. Technologically speaking the second case being much harder to perform, our problem is double: a)solve inverse kinematics for this kind of system and b) maximize the number of discrete joints. We show that the hybrid nature of the manipulator make these problems non-trivial and we develop a parallel evolution strategy and genetic algorithm in response to this dual problem. Simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed control strategy.